I Came Out to the Dirt
by William Swift

“Dear Grandad,” I told the dirt, “I am gay.” I sat in the yard, making up songs to my favorite tree. I didn’t understand death. What I did understand was that my grandparents had all died young. Therefore, I did not have any. Death, for me, was an abstract loss marking something others had and I had never possessed. I was not raised with religion; instead, I believed what I had heard somewhere along the way: when we die our bodies become dirt.